Even after the Nazis had been defeated, the "one, true, holy, catholic church" continued to sympathize with the villains over the victims !

This third of four sections deals with the continuation of scandalous ecclesiastical behavior after the holocaust, such as helping "Catholic" war criminals to escape prosecution, the cover-up of the scandalous behavior of the majority of the German Catholic hierarchy under the leadership of Pope Pius XII, the denial of access to Vatican archives, the enrichment of the Church with treasury stollen from the Jews, refusal to recognize the State of Israel, and the hierarchy's behaving now, as though nothing had been learned from the moral bankruptcy of the church manifested during the holocaust.

You would think, wouldn't you, that the holocaust ended when the Nazi war machine was defeated, and the Jews and other concentration camp detainees were freed. But while that was the end of some of the worst crimes perpetrated against these innocent men, women and children, there were still more to come. Many survivors weren't even allowed to return to their homes, and when some tried to, they were treated by the Christian communities which had driven them out of their homes and into concentration camps, as foreign invaders or thieves. Although the allies prosecuted a considerable number of the Nazi war criminals, the "liberators" chose not to prosecute a large number of others, because they saw in them some value that was more important to them than the satisfaction of the demands of justice.

Just imagine how difficult it was for the Jews, after all that they had suffered, to learn that in many instances all that their worst defeated persecutors had to do to escape punishment was to offer their services to the Americans or the Britains in the cold war against the Soviet Union. All that many others had to do was to pay enough stolen money to the Vatican and they could get a ticket on its "underground railroad" to some Catholic country in South America As we show in RC_scandal-4a.html, Pope Pius XII and Catholic apologists have offered all kinds of excuses as to why the Church hadn't been able to hide and save very many Jews from their Nazi hunters. That makes it all the more ironic that after the war the Catholic Church went to great lengths to help hundreds of the worst of these same criminals (who like themselves were Roman Catholics) hide and escape justice at the hands of the victorious allies.

In addition to churchmen defending war criminals, there have been hundreds of millions, now a billion Catholics quick to defend the hierarchy who defended the Nazi war criminals. And many of these very same apologists wonder how their bishops could protect the priests who molested innocent children! Why are Catholics so concerned when molesters of Catholic children are protected by the hierarchy, but not concerned when mass-murderers of Jews are protected by their hierarchy?

Postwar Offenses

The Catholic Church's offenses and culpability did not end with the war. After the war the Church could have spoken about the guilt of the perpetrators and called for justice. We might consider it to have been the Church's duty. After all, for generations it had publicly called for the punishment of the innocent Jews. So why did the Church not advocate the same for the Germans, Croats, Dutch, French, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and others who were actually guilty of great crimes? Why did Pius XII not excommunicate a single German or non-German mass murderer of Jews? Instead of condemning the German criminals with even an iota of the ire that it and its clergy heaped upon the innocent Jews, the Church maintained its criminal solidarity with them. Even the Germans' defeat did not change this.

What the Vatican had not done to help the unjustly hunted Jews, it gladly did for Germans and others who murdered them. Highly placed members of the Church systematically aided the leading slayers of European Jewry in escaping justice by providing them with false documents and shepherding them to South America. The roster of Vatican transgressions includes seeking clemency for convicted war criminals; resisting the extradition of potential German war criminals; hiding fugitives on Vatican properties; and abetting the escape of mass murderers by appointing Nazi sympathizers inside the Church to critical positions.''

One of the ringleaders of this substantial criminal conspiracy was the friend and confidant of Pope Pius XII and of the later Pope Paul VI, the head of the German Church in Rome, and a known passionate supporter of Nazism, Bishop Hudal. [ see http://cambridgeforecast.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/clerico-fascism-alois-hudal/ ] Bishop Hudal himself has testified that "after 1945 all my charitable work was primarily devoted to the former members of National Socialism and Fascism, particularly to the so-called `war criminals' . . . who were being persecuted" and whom he considered to be "frequently personally completely without guilt." He boasted that he "by means of false personal documents, rescued not a few of them so that they could flee their tormentors to happier lands." Whom did this important Catholic bishop at the Vatican see as these so-called tormentors? The Allies' legal authorities. The men whom Bishop Hudal and many others at the heart of the Church believed to be more innocent than the Jews included some of the greatest criminals of all time: Adolf Eichmann, who coordinated the annihilation of millions of Jews; Franz Stangl, the commander successively of two extermination camps, Sobibor and Treblinka; Kurt Christmann, the commander of Sonderkommando, which slaughtered Jews in the Soviet Union; Walter Rauff, in charge of developing the gas vans used in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands; Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon"; Ante Pavelic, the head of the mass-murdering Croatian Ustasha regime; and most infamous of all, Auschwitz's Dr. Josef Mengele.123 The efforts of Bishop Hudal and the other clergy were deeply appreciated. Eichmann, who landed safely in Argentina, decided to inscribe himself in his newly minted passport as a Catholic even though he was a Protestant. He explained: "I recall with deep gratitude the aid given to me by Catholic priests in my flight from Europe and decided to honor the Catholic faith by becoming an honorary member.

The activities of Bishop Hudal and others were widely known around the Vatican. Pius XII certainly knew of at least some of Bishop Hudal's and other high Church officials' aid to the mass murderers, whom the bishop, clearly not alone, believed to be "completely innocent." One of the high Church officials actively involved in these activities, who gave extensive reports to Pius XII twice a day, was his right-hand man, Monsignor Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. By allowing members of their church to help the mass murderers circumvent the Allied justice authorities, Monsignor Montini and Pius XII indicated their approval of such aid.

Helping criminals to escape justice is itself a criminal offense, for which those involved and those who approved of it bear guilt and blame. The Church again agrees with our assessment, declaring that if we "protect evildoers," then "we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others.

{ A Moral Reckoning, by Daniel Goldhagen, P. 175-176 }

The church as the Nazi's "salvation" :

The Catholic Church’s involvement in the escape of ex-Nazis is, by comparison, well known. It has long been established that individual Nazi sympathisers within the clergy, such as Bishop Alois Hudal in Rome and the Archbishop of Genoa, Giuseppe Siri, actively supported the flight of Nazi war criminals. However, Steinacher disputes the Vatican’s insistence that these men were misguided black sheep within an otherwise unblemished institution.

Instead, Steinacher argues that the “aid programme” for ex-Nazis within the Church was systematic and intentional, and that it has to be understood in the context of the Catholic Church’s post-war crusade for a re-Christianisation of Europe.

Fearing the emergence of a “godless” Europe full of pagans and communists, the Church was willing to help Nazi war criminals – many of them lapsed Protestants who had left their church in the 1930s – if they converted to Catholicism. Steinacher’s argument that the Vatican pursued a systematic policy of “de-Nazification through conversion” to Catholicism is unlikely to gain him many friends in Rome, but he provides plenty of evidence for his theory.

Steinacher’s painstaking reconstruction of the main escape route (which led from Innsbruck across the Alps to Genoa or Rome) underlines the heavy involvement of the Catholic clergy. Along the way, numerous monasteries provided shelter for men on the run and 90 per cent of the Nazis that escaped used that route before they embarked on a passage to South America.

Argentina, in particular, became the preferred destination for Nazi refugees. According to Steinacher’s estimate, at least 350 high-ranking Nazis escaped to Argentina. The Argentinian dictator Juan Perón even hoped to attract up to half a million Germans after the war, notably military experts. New immigrants primarily had to fulfil two qualifications: they had to be skilled labourers or academically trained experts; and they were not allowed to be Communists. Ex-SS officers usually fulfilled both criteria. A Nazi past was not a requirement for an immigration visa to Argentina, but it was certainly no obstacle either.

Steinacher’s book focuses on Argentina, but it also offers intriguing new perspectives on other “safe havens” in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The post-war journey of former SS colonel Walter Rauff, who invented the mobile gas vans used to kill thousands of Jews along the Eastern front, exemplifies the transnational dimension of Nazi escape routes: after the war, he was first hidden by Bishop Siri of Genoa, before fleeing to Damascus in 1947. In late 1949, he used Red Cross documentation to move to Ecuador, where he worked for Bayer pharmaceutical company. In the early 1960s, Rauff retired to Santiago de Chile, where he died peacefully in 1984.

North Africa and the Middle East also proved to be very popular destinations for ex-Nazis, most notably after the fall of Perón’s regime in 1955, which made Argentina a much less hospitable place for them."
[from a review of the book, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice, By Gerald Steinacher, Oxford University Press, 416pp.
at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0709/1224300361267_pf.html ]
See also, The aftermath of World War II.

This famous Jewish artist tried to show the Catholic Church how wrong it was
for it to view Hitler as a protector of Christianity from Communism.
[ http://www.szyk.org/world-war-ii ]

Why all of this is YOUR business :

The Roman Catholic Church is a very complex entity, with a very erratic history. It has sometimes identified with the poor, the needy and the oppressed, as Jesus clearly wanted his followers to do. But sadly, its leadership, the "supreme pontiff" and the "princes of the church" have too often sided with the rich and the powerful ruling classes of this world. This section of the "Liberals Like Christ" web site may appear to blind apologists for the church as "anti-Catholic". But it is no more anti-Catholic than a surgeon who operates to remove cancers is "anti-patient". The author of these pages was such a devout Catholic during the first 33 years of his life that he went to Catholic schools and seminaries for 25 years, became an R. C. priest, earned an advanced degree in Theology from the prestigious Catholic U. of America in the nation's capital, and then taught in a Catholic seminary. Most of his 200 or so close living relatives are still Roman Catholics. Though he has since become a United Methodist minister (now retired), he still loves Roman Catholics as individuals and he still appreciates the many great things that the Roman Catholic Church can and sometimes does stand for.

That being said, there are flaws in the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy that are too important to be excused and/or ignored – as they are by too many people today, –whether they be inside or outside of that church. And because this church is the single largest church in America today, and the only one that has a single head to speak for its whole body, no American – whether Catholic or "non-Catholic" – can afford the luxury of ignoring this "elephant" in their living room.

[ the April 1st, 2002 issue of Time magazine featured this dramatic cover : ]
[ and several very interesting articles on the problems
facing the Roman Catholic Church, both worldwide and stateside.]

Shouldn't the Church Leaders in Nazi Europe have heard and heeded these words?

When the Bible spoke of "prophets", it didn't normally mean people predicting the future – as it often does today – but preachers bravely telling people what God wants them to hear, when there are great forces working to prevent that message from being heard. These are some examples of what Jeremiah and Ezekiel thought of the way many of the preachers, religious leaders and/or prophets dealt with the difficult circumstances of their times. I think the parallels to the role of church leaders in NAZI Europe are quite obvious:

Jeremiah 8: 4-12

"You shall say to them, Thus says the Lord: "When people fall, do they not get up again? If they go astray, do they not turn back? Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? They have held fast to deceit, they have refused to return. I have given heed and listened, but they do not speak honestly; no one repents of wickedness, saying, "What have I done!" All of them turn to their own course, like a horse plunging headlong into battle. . . my people do not know the ordinance of the Lord. How can you say, "We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us," when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie? The wise shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken; since they have rejected the word of the Lord, what wisdom is in them? . . . from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, "Peace, peace," when there is no peace. They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not at all ashamed, they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time when I punish them, they shall be overthrown, says the Lord."

Ezekiel 3:16-21

"The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, I have made you a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, "You shall surely die," and you give them no warning, or speak to warn the wicked from their wicked way, in order to save their life, those wicked persons shall die for their iniquity; but their blood I will require at your hand.

But if you warn the wicked, and they do not turn from their wickedness, or from their wicked way, they shall die for their iniquity; but you will have saved your life. Again, if the righteous turn from their righteousness and commit iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block before them, they shall die; because you have not warned them, they shall die for their sin, and their righteous deeds that they have done shall not be remembered; but their blood I will require at your hand. If, however, you warn the righteous not to sin, and they do not sin, they shall surely live, because they took warning; and you will have saved your life."

{ Ezekiel 33:1-9}

"The word of the Lord came to me: "O Mortal, speak to your people and say to them, If I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take one of their number as their sentinel; and if the sentinel sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people; then if any who hear the sound of the trumpet do not take warning, and the sword comes and takes them away, their blood shall be upon their own heads. They heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning; their blood shall be upon themselves. But if they had taken warning, they would have saved their lives.

But if the sentinel sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any of them, they are taken away in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at the sentinel's hand. So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, "O wicked ones, you shall surely die," and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, (then) the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, (then) the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life."

Ezekiel 34:1-10

"The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them – to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord God: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with no one to search or seek for them. Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As I live, says the Lord God, because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all the wild animals, since there was no shepherd; and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves, and have not fed my sheep; therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: Thus says the Lord GOD, I am against the shepherds; and I will demand my sheep at their hand, and put a stop to their feeding the sheep; no longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them."

And this is what Jesus taught :

The powerful sermon about the Last Judgement (Matt. 25), which threatens with damnation those who don't intercede to help those deprived of food, clothes, health, homes, and liberty (like millions of Jews all around them).

The powerful Parable of the Good Samaritan, in which he warns against following the example of the insensitive Priest and Levite, and sets up instead the example of an infidel who helps a misfortune person as the way to fulfill the second Great Commandment. If Jesus spoke so highly of a man stopping to help one victim, what would he say of clerics refusing to help 6 million and more victims of NAZI persecution?

The powerful instruction of { 1 John 3:17-29 }

"If someone who is supposed to be a Christian has money enough to live
well, and sees a brother in need and won't help him – how can God's love
be within him? Little children, let us stop just saying
we love people; let us really love them, and show it by our actions. Then
we will know for sure, by our actions, that we are on God's side, and our
consciences will be clear, even when we stand before the Lord.

But if we have bad consciences and feel that we have done wrong, the Lord
will surely feel it even more, for he knows everything we do. But, dearly
loved friends, if our consciences are clear, we can come to the Lord with
perfect assurance and trust, and get whatever we ask for because we are
obeying him and doing the things that please him. And this is what God
says we must do: Believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love
one another. Those who do what God says – they are living with God and
he with them. We know this is true because the Holy Spirit
he has given us tells us so."

The following shows how little remorse there was in
the German episcopacy at the very end of WW II :

The Holocaust and the Catholic Church's Search for Forgiveness
by (Jesuit priest) James Bernauer, S.J., Professor of Philosophy

A Presentation at Boston College's Center For Religion
and American Public Life, October 30, 2002 [ www.bc.edu/research/cjl/meta-elements/texts/cjrelations/resources/articles/bernauer.htm ]

"We have an important window into the German Bishops' view of this criticism in a fascinating, unpublished document [A copy of the document, "The Catholic Church and Dr. Kogon" is in the John Riedel Papers, series 1, box 2, Catholic Church and Nazism File in the Archives of Marquette University. Riedel was Chief of Catholic Affairs for the Office of Military Government for Germany from 1946 to 1948 and later a professor of philosophy at Marquette. The official was Richard Akselrad]. In it is a report of an August 23, 1947 conversation between an official of the American Military Government and several German Bishops. They strongly reject the criticisms of their conduct under the Nazis.

Cardinal Frings of Cologne, who was the titular head of the German Church at the time, asked the interviewer: "Who has the right to demand that the bishops should have chosen a form of fight that would have sent them to the gallows with infallible certainty, and which would have resulted in a campaign of extermination against the church?"

Bishop Stohr of Mainz denied that the survivors of concentration camps were more courageous than the Bishops whom they were now criticizing. He claimed: "Most of them were thrown in concentration camps against their will as a result of indirect utterances and secret actions. Also, many of them became victims of their own imprudence and rashness which have nothing to do with courage."

Archbishop Jaeger of Paderborn did voice the fear that, if the Bishops had challenged the Nazi regime more forcefully, there was real danger that "many members of our church, who had been blinded and misled by a deceitful propaganda would all the more have been driven into the arms of National Socialism by too sharp a language."

Bishop Dietz of Fulda argued that the conduct of the German Bishops followed the highest model: "The basically pastoral attitude of the church is taken from the higher example set by Jesus when he was brought before the High Priests, before King Herod, and Pilate."

This model of humility certainly reflected a Catholic theology which praised the cultivation of passive virtues as particularly appropriate for the Christian life; virtues such as obedience, patience, gentleness, mortification. It did contrast, however, with the very aggressive approach the Bishops took to the Allied authorities whom they denounced for the denazification program, for the war crimes trials the Allies were conducting and to whom they submitted pleas for leniency for some of the most notorious Nazi criminals."

"Unholy Trinity: the Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss banks", by Mark Aarons and John Loftus . Revised ed. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998. xviii, 392 pp

Note: This book has caused considerable controversy since it first appeared in 1992. . It documents how western money and Nazi blood money was laundered through Switzerland and then out through the Vatican Bank, the one bank that could not be audited, to South America and back to Germany. The paradoxical role of the ultra-Catholic Dulles brothers as members of the U S intelligence community with connections to German business leaders and the Vatican is detailed. The authors, reporting on the Vatican's Nazi-smuggling network at the end of the war that sent fugitives mostly to Argentina, where they were welcomed by the Perons, conclude that the smuggling venture was primarily for the financial interests of non-German investors, including the Vatican.
This is an excerpt from the U.S. National Archives: archives.gov/research_room/holocaust_era_assets/ bibliographies/trade_with_third_reich.html

The means of escape were the Vatican run "Ratlines." Operated with the knowledge and blessing of highly placed US and British government officials, the Ratlines guided 30,000 wanted Nazi's to sanctuary. Safe haven locations included the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the favourite bolt hole of them all: South America.

Those who reached safety in this manner read like a "Who's Who" of the most wanted Nazi war criminals. Klaus Barbie, the cruel Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyon;" Franz Stangl, Commandant of the notorious Treblinka extermination camp; Gustav Wagner Commandant of Sorbibor extermination camp; Alois Brunner, a brutal official in the Jewish deportation programme. Of the most famous to escape along the ratlines were Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the "Holocaust" and Dr Joseph Mengele, the "White Angel" of Auschwitz concentration camp. Not least was Deputy Führer Martin Bormann. Incredibly, an entire Waffen SS division - the notorious "Galician Division" - consisting of 8000 men were smuggled to England.

"Denying Pius's complicity in the church's smuggling of Nazi and Croatian Fascists out of Europe flies in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Uki Goni's The Real Odessa (Granta Books, 2002, second edition) provides the conclusive documentation. Using previously unavailable material from the Public Record Office in England and from the U.S. National Archives and Record Administration, Goni clearly demonstrates that Pius knew that ecclesiastical institutions in Rome were hiding war criminals." ( from www.commonwealmagazine.org /12003/may92003/5903ar.htm an article in the Catholic magazine by Michael Phayer.

After having rushed to recognize the Nazi regime of Hitler, the R.C. Church
devoted 45 years to resisting official recognition of the State of Israel :

"Holy See" ? Isn't it amusing how English-speaking Catholic churchmen insist on translating the Latin "Sancta Sedes" into the meaningless "Holy See", instead of the correct, but silly–sounding "Holy Seat"?

a papal throne

The Holy See "did have strong opinions about keeping European Jews out of Palestine. On June 22, 1943, the Vatican sent these points to its apostolic delegation in Washington: "If the greater part of Palestine is given to the Jewish people, this would be a severe blow to the religious attachments of Catholics to this land. To have the Jewish people in the majority would interfere with the peaceful exercise of these rights in the Holy Land already vested in Catholics."

Even after Israel was founded in 1948, the Vatican's official newspaper insisted: "Modern Israel is not the true heir of biblical Israel. ... Therefore, the Holy Land and its sacred sites belong to Christianity, the true Israel."

In 1964, during Pope Paul VI's historic visit to Jerusalem, he refused to publicly utter the word "Israel," and even his thank-you note to then-President Zalman Shazar was mailed to Tel Aviv, lest he be accused of acknowledging Israel's sovereignty in Jerusalem.

"In 1948 the Catholic Church refused to recognize the founding of the state of Israel. . . The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val, cited the Church's "highest principles" in rebuffing (Jewish pleas), and explicitly denied the right of Jews to remain Jews: "I do not quite see how we can take any initiative in this matter. As long as the Jews deny the divinity of Christ, we certainly cannot make a declaration in their favor. Not that we have any ill will toward them. . . The history of Israel is our own heritage, it is our foundation. But in order for us to come out for the Jewish people in the way you desire, they would first have to be converted.". . .

When the State of Israel was declared in May 1948, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's newspaper, reflecting the Church's unabated eliminationist spirit, imperiously announced to the world, including to the remnants of the slaughtered Jewish communities of Europe seeking a safe home: "Modern Israel is not the true heir of Biblical Israel, but a secular state. . . Therefore the Holy Land and its sacred sites belong to Christianity, the True Israel. For decades the Vatican would not even utter the country's name. In 1964 Pope Paul VI spent a day in Jerusalem refusing to let the word "Israel" pass his lips. During the decades after Israel's founding, the Church did recognize virtually every other country in the world, one tyranny after another, including atheistic Communist states and many mass-murdering regimes, for example, in Central and South America during the 1970's and I980's.° But not the political state of the Jews. The same Church that signed the Concordat with Hitler, granting Nazi Germany international legitimacy, withheld international legitimacy from the country that became the home of the survivors of Europe's broken Jewish communities. With every passing year of its nonrecognition, the Church again singled out the Jews as pariahs - this time as a political community.

All the Church's justifications for its injurious stance toward the political home of the Jews cannot hide the simple fact that the Church's politics of its own supremacy over Judaism, its supersessionism, its antisemitism, and its theology derived from Augustine - that Jews were exiled from their land and condemned to wander the world forever because of their rejection of the divinity of Jesus-trumped the most basic needs of the Jews, and the moral necessity of treating them with the same respect, and of according to them the same political rights that the Church does to other peoples. The Church's multifarious offenses leading up to the Holocaust and during the mass murder itself did not in 1948 and for decades thereafter temper the Church's supersessionist hostility to Jews. Instead of being at the forefront of protecting the political rights of Jews, as its obligation of political restitution requires, the laggard Church, was still, almost fifty years after the Holocaust, denying the Jews their right to political security.
By the early 1990's the Church's continuing denial of the legitimacy of Israel, of the right of Jews, alone among the nations, to have a country of their own, became too embarrassing and too great a political liability for the Church, as the former Communist countries resumed diplomatic relations, and India, China, Arab countries, and others recognized Israel. This left the Vatican "in a tiny minority of the most irreconcilable enemies of Israel the lone Christian voice in a Muslim chorus." So the Church agreed at the end of 1993 to recognize Israel, which was not formalized until late 1994 when ambassadors were exchanged.''
[ Moral Reckoning, pp.239-40]

In his message for the Roman Catholic Church's World Day of Social
Communications, to be celebrated on May 8, (2005) Pope John Paul II said that "today more than ever the media had to be aware of its enormous power to
either unite or divide people.

When others are portrayed in hostile terms, seeds of conflict are sown
which can all too easily escalate into violence, war, or even genocide," he
said in the written message.

Instead of building unity and understanding, the media can be used to
demonize other social, ethnic and religious groups, fomenting fear and
hatred." [ "homosexuals" however, is another matter ! ]

We deplore the "passion plays" of the past, and Mel Gibson's "Passion movie", which may not specifically intend to fuel anti-semitism as its primary purpose, but which has proven tragically in the past that they can have that effect as a bi-product, intended or not.

In 2009, this Brazilian archbishop joined the ultra-conservative Bishop Richard Williamson of the Society of St. Pius X, in playing down the numbers of Jews who were killed in the holocaust and insisting that Roman Catholics suffered more than the Jews in World War II.

We’re living in the Age of Globalization, and it seems that chutzpah, like latkes, isn’t just for Jews any longer. Last week, retired Bishop Giacomo Babini of the Italian town of Grosseto told the Catholic Pontifex website that the Catholic pedophile scandal is being orchestrated by the “eternal enemies of Catholicism, namely the freemasons and the Jews, whose mutual entanglements are not always easy to see through. … I think that it is primarily a Zionist attack, in view of its power and refinement. They dislike the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God-killers.”

Bishop Babini's comments remind me of this tragicomic Jewish joke from the 1930s:
A German Jew in Berlin sees a Jewish friend sitting on a park bench reading the anti-Semitic Nazi rag, Der Stürmer. "Yitzak," he says, "how can you read such a thing?"
"Well, David," Yitzak replies, "I find reading the ordinary newspaper to be terribly depressing: it's full of stories about gangs attacking synagogues, old Jews getting beaten to a pulp in the street, anti-Semitic slogans painted on Jewish shops. But here in this newspaper, the news is all excellent. It says here that we Jews own all the banks and newspapers and run all the world's governments!"

You might think that the 81 year-old Babini had already said more than enough for one day, but once some people "pop," they just can’t stop. “The Holocaust was a disgrace for all of humanity,” the good bishop told the world, “but now we have to look at it without rhetoric and with open eyes. Don’t dismiss Hitler as a crazy man. The truth is that the Nazis’ criminal fury was provoked by (i.e. a justifiable response to) the Jews’ economic embezzlement, by which they choked the German economy.” He concluded that the Jews’ “guilt is graver than what Christ predicted would happen to them, saying ‘do not cry for me, but for your own children.’”

Bishop Babini made the comments on Friday, but the story has only started hitting the fan (a.k.a. the global press) today. The American Jewish Committee already lodged a protest against the bishop’s statements over the weekend. Rabbi David Rosen said: “The high level of mutual trust and solidarity that binds our two communities today demands that there be zero-tolerance for such defamatory statements by religious representatives.” Babini himself now denies ever having made them. The bishop seems to relish controversy, by the way. In January he hit the headlines when he opined that the Church should refuse communion to gay people.

This latest scapegoating attempt came out not only in the days around Holocaust Remembrance Day but also on the heels of the latest alarmist report by Tel Aviv University announcing a drastic increase in anti-Semitic activity around the globe, and with historian Robert Wistrich saying that “We are in an era once again where the Jews are facing genocidal threats as a people.”

( In a public address, in late Nov., 2004 ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that a religion-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.
In the synagogue that is home to America's oldest Jewish congregation, he also noted that in Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never publicly use the word "God." Scalia told them that while the church-and-state battle rages, the official examples of the presence of faith go back to America's Founding Fathers: the word "God" on U.S. currency; chaplains of various faiths in the military and the legislature; real estate tax-exemption for houses of worship _ and the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Last year, Scalia removed himself from the Supreme Court's review of whether "under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance, after mentioning the case in a speech and complaining that courts are stripping God from public life. "None of this is compatible with what we say when we express the so-called principle of neutrality," Scalia said.

But, the justice asked, "Did it turn out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America? I don't think so."
[ from http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--scalia-religion1122nov22,0,6235446,print.story ]
In this powerful Roman Catholic Supreme Court justice's bizarro world, the persecution of the Jews had nothing to do with the centuries old animosity against the Jews in either Catholic or Protestant Europe or with the Conservative Fascist Catholics who ruled most of the Nazi Axis powers of Europe during the Holocaust. And on the other hand, the safety the Jews have found in the "New World" had nothing to do with the strict separation of Church and State practiced in the United States or the Secularist Liberals who were in charge of our government during that entire period !
We "Liberals Like Christ" believe that, after their almost successful attempt to exterminate the Jewish population from the face of the earth, Christians should be doing all that they can to help rebuild Judaism, rather than trying to "save" Jews from Judaism. Here is one site where former cult members are offering help to past and future escapees from "Jews for Jesus".